


Disappointment

by mtjester



Series: Insurrectionbent [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sgrub Session, Alternia, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-13
Updated: 2013-01-13
Packaged: 2017-11-25 10:20:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/637864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtjester/pseuds/mtjester
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat didn't want to hide from the culling drones for the rest of his life, but after running from conscription, he didn't have much of a choice.  He was barely fortunate enough to find somewhere to stay.  Luckily, he had a friend whose hive was concealed in the grooves of a cliff face, and Nepeta was more than happy to have him bumming around her cave, even if he did spend most of his time sulking and cursing his fate as a mutant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Disappointment

**Author's Note:**

> Set before the events of [Insurrection for Desperate Dreamers.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/629667/chapters/1138507)
> 
> [Fic theme](http://mtjester.tumblr.com/post/40495674672/for-disappointment-part-of-my-insurrectionbent)

Karkat had been glaring at the shipping wall since Nepeta left for the hunt, doing nothing to prevent the resentment bubbling in his chest.  How was it that everyone else painted on the wall got to leave Alternia to follow their dreams but he had to sit in a cave for the rest of his miserable existence?  Why couldn’t he be traversing the universe, fighting for the glory of troll kind with the Threshecutioners, rising up through the ranks like the born leader he was?  What had he ever done to deserve this shitty fate as a forgotten outcast?

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, he thought.  He had been meant for something important.  He had been meant for greatness, damn it!  But a perigee had gone by and he hadn’t done a damn thing with his life, and it looked as though that pattern would continue indefinitely.

He examined the pairings, one by one, cursing their smug and happy faces.  The wall probably wasn’t even relevant now that everyone had left.  They were all probably bumping bulges with new crowds, growing apart as they discovered their separate callings.  Take Nepeta and Equius, for example. Nepeta had insisted that their moirallegiance would be fine after Conscription Day, even if she stayed on Alternia without him, but now they couldn’t even chat for fear that the culling drones would discover her position.  Karkat hadn’t dared to open a chat client either, and he hadn’t heard a thing from Gamzee.  It seemed as though their pale relationships were doomed to fail, and who knew what sort of problems the others were having with their preexisting relationships?  It looked like everything they had thought was true and fateful was all slowly falling apart.

His eyes fell upon the picture that iced the cake of his suffering, the small drawing of him and Terezi holding hands like everything was perfectly right with the world.  What a joke.  What a big fucking joke.  He probably wouldn’t ever see her again.  He should have said something to her when he had had the chance, but of course he couldn’t work up the courage for it when it had actually mattered.  Nice job, Vantas, he told himself, you’re the worst fuck-up in the long and nonexclusive history of graceless fuck-ups.  Now she was gone forever, probably going red for some chump who actually had the spine to approach her about it.

Sometimes he wanted nothing more than to smear the shit out of all of those pictures.  It wasn’t like they mattered.  Nothing mattered anymore, not now that he and his mutant blood had thrown everything into the shitter.  But he left the wall alone, because somehow it was still important to Nepeta, even though she hadn’t heard a word from the outside world since he had come crawling to her asking for help like a degenerate vagrant begging for a bread crust.  He couldn’t understand her.  All hope had been lost, and still somehow she held onto the idiotic notion that things still _mattered_. 

If he didn’t have to act grateful for her charity, he would have told her to quit hiding from the reality of their shitty situation and face the hopelessness of it all with something resembling dignity.

He huffed with annoyance as he heard noises echo in from outside the cave, announcing Nepeta’s arrival.  He could hear her jabbering to herself, continuing her perpetual role-play game for her own childish amusement.  He sighed and cursed his fate for confining him to a small space with a simpleton who had no concept of despair.

“Nepeta saunters into the cave, excitement for her recent kill glittering in her eyes,” she said, pulling a large beast behind her as she entered.  “She spares a minute to say hello to Karcat—hello, Karcat!—and then returns to the beast, licking her lips in anticipation.  But she must wait to sink her fangs into the delicious meat!  First, she must collect its blood to paint pictures of the glorious hunt.”

As she spoke, she tied a rope around the beast’s hind legs and tossed the other end over a rock jutting from the wall near the ceiling.  She began to pull on the rope, grunting with the strain of lifting the beast off the floor.  Karkat rolled his eyes and went back to brooding about his suffering, ignoring her the best he could.

“Nepeta finally lifts the beast off the floor,” she said, panting, “and prepares the bowl beneath it.  With a swift swipe of her super sharp claws, the beast’s throat is slit!”  Following her own narration, she slit its throat open and blood poured out, splashing grotesquely into the bowl she had placed beneath it.

“Oh god, do you really have to do that in here?” Karkat asked, staring at the bloody mess with disgust.  “I know we’re having a great time living it up fast and hard in this primitive bachelor pad you’ve got going for yourself, but I’m gonna have to be the asshole roommate with the stick shoved up his nook about dead animals bleeding out while they hang from the ceiling.  Didn’t we have a clause in the roommate contract about shit like this?”

“’Roommate contract?’ Nepeta asks, quirking her head to the side,” Nepeta said, following suit.

“Oh, that’s right, we don’t have a fucking roommate contract.  But if we did, the first thing it would say is no bloodbaths in the living room.”

“Nepeta looks confused—“

“Stop with the role-playing thing and talk to me like a person.”

She sighed.  “If I don’t do this sometimes, I wouldn’t have anything to paint with,” she explained.  “It’s not really that bad, is it?”

“It’s getting blood all over the place!” he said, pointing at the overflowing bowl.  “I don’t know about you, but I prefer my living spaces to be somewhat clean and, you know, bloodless.”

She sighed again.  “Nepeta understands Karkat’s discomfurt.  She will move the beast outside and purrpare her paint there.”

Karkat watched her lower the beast, trying her best not to spill any more of its blood onto the floor, and as she hauled its body outside, he went back to staring at the shipping wall, annoyance throbbing in his head.  She came back inside after a few minutes and approached him fervently, eyeing him as she slinked into a seat beside him.  He ignored her as she looked from him to the shipping wall and back to him.

“You’re grumpy today,” she finally said.

His mouth twitched.  “You would be too if you went as long as I have without fresh air."

“No, not that kind of grumpy.  You’re always that kind of grumpy.  I mean grumpier than usual.”

 “What?  No, I’m not.  I’m just the same utterly miserable, I-hate-myself-and-my-life kind of grumpy.”

“No, you’re defurnitely more grumpy today.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

“...You caught me.  I loathe myself more acutely today than all the other days I’ve spent loathing myself.  How could I have possibly thought I could fool you and your great powers of observation?  You’re just too damn good at digging the truth out of my mountain of bullshit.”

She ignored his jab and looked at him with sympathy.  “Are you missing everyone?” she asked, tilting her head towards the shipping wall.

“Why the hell would I?  They did nothing but drive me batshit crazy all the fucking time anyways.  I didn’t even like most of them.”

“But they were your furends!”

“Friendship isn’t worth shit.  It’s a mistake.  A big joke on nature that shouldn’t even happen.  I don’t have any friends.”

“Well, if you keep talking like that, you won’t!”

“What’s it even matter how I talk!” he said.  “The only person that can hear me is you.  You are literally the only person in the whole damn universe that even knows I exist right now.  What’s the point of friends?  What’s the point of fucking relationships?  This wall,” he said, gesturing towards the shipping wall, “is a joke, just like friendship.  It doesn’t mean anything anymore. We should be flying around space, living lives of drama and intrigue, not bumming around with your lusus like a couple of wigglers.  Hell, we’re probably the only goddamn adults on Alternia right now!  For all the attention you put into this _stupid_ wall, we’re the ones that are never gonna find matesprits or kismesisses and who knows if we’ll ever talk to our moirails again!”

He ended his rant with an angry noise of frustration, slumping into himself with his arms crossed and buried against his chest.  If he had looked at Nepeta, he would have noticed a hint of hurt in her expression, but he was too focused on glaring at the shipping wall to pay her any heed.

She gave him a few seconds to calm himself before asking, “How can you say that?”

“It probably helps that I’m not an autistic girl that lives in a perpetual role-play fantasy,” he said, grumbling.

"That doesn't matter! We're not going to be stuck here forever. It's just for a little while, while the drones furget about you. We'll still have a chance to meet up with our old furends and live our dreams and find the best matesprits and kismesisses and auspistices ever! You can't give up hope, Karkat."

"Would you think for once?" Karkat demanded. "We already missed out! We _missed our chance_. Our moirails probably think we're dead, and we'll never have a conscription. Who would want to get involved with two losers like us? Even if we leave, we're going to end up old spinsters with no place in the universe."

"Is that what you're worried about? Whether someone will want to get involved with you when you leave?"

"Pff...no! I mean, it's kind of important, but it's just...an example of the way we suck, okay?"

"Don't lie! It's the only thing you care about," Nepeta said, turning towards him. "Now I know why you spend all your time rereading bad romance books and watching even worse romcoms!"

“It’s not the only thing I care about.  What else am I supposed to do in this hole, make some sort of fully functional bullshit city out of cans and paint a universe on the walls with your disgusting blood paint?  Only someone completely retarded would resort to such an asinine waste of time.”

“The only thing you really want is a cute romance with some purretty troll! That's why you're complaining, isn't it?”

“It is not!”

“Is too.”

“I care about so many things, you probably couldn’t even begin to comprehend the number of things I care about.  I give so many shits about a whole plethora of subjects, it’s a fucking miracle I haven’t blown my asshole out yet.”

“But you don’t obsess over any of those things like you obsess about romance.  I don't know why I didn't see it earlier! You’re even worse than I am.”

“Fucking _please_ , you can’t even to begin to compare us on this subject.  For starters, the only thing you care about is projecting your subjective and arbitrary whims onto pairings so long as you think they’re even marginally possible.  I, on the other hand, am concerned with the more complex and elusive aspects of romance, such as how pity and hate manifest differently in different trolls and what processes take place to cause such emotions to be so powerful.  My view on romance is academic while yours is just that of a bored, voyeuristic teenager getting her kicks off other people’s drama.”

Nepeta made a noise of protest.  “My shipping wall is way more intricat than that!” she said.

“Oh, sure it is.  I bet there’s all sorts of minor nuances and little complex equations involved in the construction of your pairings,” Karkat said with a sneer.

“If it were so fur below you, you wouldn’t have drawn on it!” she said, pointing to the two or three sloppy paintings Karkat had attempted to draw on the wall.

“I never said it was below me.  I just said that I’m capable of a more sophisticated approach to romance than you are.”

“You know what I think your purrblem is?” Nepeta said, sulking a bit.  “You care about romance _too_ much!  You say it doesn’t matter because you don’t like how much it really does matter to you!”

“What?  That’s stupid.  I said it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t matter.  Look, we don’t even know these people anymore, so what’s the point of arguing about their love lives?”

“No, that’s not what you were saying at all!” she insisted.  “You were saying that we don’t have a right to talk about romance because we’re gonna miss out on all the real romance here on Alternia.  You were saying it doesn’t matter because you’re afur’d you’ll never get to see what romance is really about!  You’re afur’d you’ll never get to experience the thing you care so much about!”

“Well, isn’t that pretty fucking true?  There are nothing but wigglers on Alternia, so it’s not like we’re gonna be finding our fated partners here.”

“You’re secretly angry because you were hoping one of our friends would be your matesprit or your kismesis, aren't you? So now that they’re not here you think there’s no hope for you at all.”

“Like hell I was!  They were all a bunch of nutjobs, why the hell would I be holding out for any of them?  There’s a whole universe of trolls out there.  Have you thought that maybe it occurred to me that I’d find someone outside the select few lunatics we knew in our youth?”

“Don’t pretend like you didn’t have feelings for someone!”

“Look, that’s personal information, and I don’t want to talk about it with you of all people,” he said.  “Besides, it wouldn’t matter anyways.  We can’t even chat with any of them, so what’s the point of pining after a red crush you’ll never see again?”

“That’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it?” she asked, leaning forward to look at his face.  He turned away from her in annoyance.  “You’re sad because you think you lost your chance.”

“I’m not sad, okay?  I’m just mad.  And I don’t think I lost my chance, I _did_ lose it.  I fucked up my chance so badly the investigators needed to check its dental records to identify its mangled corpse.  Even if I did get to see her again, she’d probably have all her quadrants filled up and wouldn’t even know to feel bad for my sorry ass about it.  For all my talk about romance, I am the biggest romantic failure the universe has ever known.”

They both sat quietly for a moment, letting that statement settle.  Nepeta was stunned by the sudden confession, and Karkat was just bitter, feeling even shittier now that he had said it out loud.  Grinding his teeth, he finally said, “But that doesn’t fucking matter.  There are more important things to be pissed about.  Like how I’m not leading the Threshecutioners to battle on distant planets, earning respect and praise across the universe like I was born to do.  Maybe it’s hard for you to comprehend, since you seem to be purrrrfectly content hanging out here and working on your quaint little cave art for future archeologists to discover years from now, but some of us don’t want to rot on Alternia like diseased carcasses.  I have ambition.  I was meant to be a great leader, undertaking some awesome cause and organizing a group of able-bodied trolls to unprecedented victory.  But hey, it’s not like that fucking matters either, since there’s no way to do any of that now that we’ve run away from conscription like a couple of cowards.”

“...Maybe you’ll still get your chance,” Nepeta offered, still recovering from Karkat’s romantic outburst.  “Maybe...you’ll get your chance to do all of those things.  There’s nothing stopping you from leaving Alternia someday.”

“You mean besides the drones poking around the countryside with culling forks, looking for hapless trolls to spear?”

“They can't search for you furever, right?"

"Hell if I know."

"There’s always a way, right?  And if you think it’s your destiny, then maybe it really is.  Just like if you think someone is a fated partner, they purrobably are.  ...Right?”

He glanced at her, deciding whether to rip into her for her stupid optimism, but he decided against it.  “Who knows,” he said.

They fell silent, and Nepeta shifted as though she wanted to say more but didn't know what to say. Surrendering to her discomfort, she announced, “I think my prey is done bleeding now, so I’ll prepare it for dinner.  I’ll be right back!”  She moved towards the entrance of the cave but stopped in front of the shipping wall, glancing back at him.  “Karkat?” she asked tentatively.

He exhaled moodily.  “What?”

“Is it...this one?” she asked, pointing down at the picture of him and Terezi.  He felt heat rising to his face.

“None of your business!” he snapped, flustered.  “Why would you even think—?”

“You look at that one a lot,” she replied sheepishly.  “And...I guess it was always a bit obvious.”

“You really are a shameless voyeur!  Do you just sit around watching me look at stuff?”

“Only sometimes,” she admitted.  “Mostly I just watch you mess around with your sickle.  Because you look like a doofus and it’s funny.”

“I look nothing but cool and courageous when I mess around with my sickle!”

“No, you look like a doofus!”

“I do not!”

She laughed and slipped out of the cave.  Karkat huffed and looked back at the shipping wall, but now all he could think about was Nepeta watching him swing his sickle around.  He didn’t look that much like a doofus when he was practicing his moves.  At least, he thought he didn’t.  Maybe sometimes he did, but he was getting a lot better.  That was why he was practicing, after all, so who cared if he looked like a doofus?  He didn’t.

He sat for a few more seconds before releasing a moody sigh, and then, glancing at the cave entrance to make sure that Nepeta was safely out of view, he stood up and retrieved his sickle from his strife specibus.

**Author's Note:**

> [If you followed the link from chapter 2 of IDD to find this work, click here to return to chapter 3.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/629667/chapters/1164992)


End file.
